Monday, 7 July 2014

The Diabetes Epidemic. What the Media does not tell us!

Given that BBC News are reporting that the current epidemic of Diabetes threatens to bankrupt the NHS, here is what the BBC, and the rest of the mainstream media, is steadfastly refusing to tell you! Lots of Big Pharma drugs cause diabetes!

The BBC reported (28th September 2006) that the number of people diagnosed with diabetes has increased by over 100,000 in the previous year, and that its prevalence had jumped from 3.3% to 3.6%, or from 1,766,000 to over 1,890,999 in just one year. These figures were taken from the Government's Information Centre. In the same article, Douglas Smallwood (Diabetes UK) said that

"up to 750,000 people have diabetes and are not aware of it. This means that thousands of people are going about their daily lives unaware they have a condition that reduces their life expectancy".

Another BBC News report, 16th March 2007, said that the number of under-fives with diabetes had increased 5-fold, and affected one child in every 1,000 in 2004. The number of under-15's with diabetes had almost doubled during the study, which focused on 2.6 million people in the Oxford region between 1985 and 2004. The charity Diabetes UK said that the trend applied to the whole of the UK, as other studies had revealed similar rises. Professor Polly Bingley, who led the study, said the rate of childhood diabetes was increasing all over Europe , particularly in the very young. She said that these increases were too steep to be put down to genetic factors alone, and blamed 'changes in our environment', 'being exposed to something new', or 'reduced exposure to something that was previously controlling our immune responses'.

The problem is now getting so big, it is 'threatening to overwhelm the NHS' (The Independent, and other papers, 24th February 2009). This article said that the number of people newly diagnosed with diabetes has more than doubled (from 83,000 in 2006, to 167,000 in 2008, and that more than 2.2 million people in Britain now suffer from the adult-onset type of the disease.

Although diet and lifestyle factors are an important contributory factor in this epidemic, NHS-ConMed drugs are also implicated. WDDTY March 2007 (reporting the Lancet 2007; 369:201-7) said that "it's been suspected for nearly 50 years that antihypertensive drugs provoke diabetes because they lower a patient's glucose tolerance levels". But a definitive statement has been hard to come by as many patients with raised blood pressure are simply more likely to develop diabetes in any event. But it says that researchers from Rush Medical College in Chicago arrived at these conclusion after re-examining 22 clinical trials involving more than 143,000 patients who did not have diabetes when they started taking an antihypertensive drug to control their blood pressure.

In a story published in the New York Times (17 December 2006), Yahoo News (17 December 17 2006) and Consumer Affairs (18 December 2006) evidence had been obtained by an attorney representing patients in a lawsuit suggested that Eli Lilly covered up concerns about its schizophrenia drug Zyprexa. Although the company denies this, the documents suggest that the company withheld important information about the drug's links to obesity and increased blood sugar levels for the 10 years it was being marketed. The drug is implicated in causing diabetes.

The British Heart Foundation Statistics website, in 2010 outlined the following statistics:

* Over 4% of men, and 3% of women in England have been diagnosed with diabetes.

*The estimate that there are just under 1.9 million adults with diagnosed diabetes in the USA.* It says that the Health Survey for England found that not all diabetes is diagnosed, and that 3% of men, and 0.7% of women aged 35 and over have undiagnosed diabetes. As a result, they estimate that around 2.5 million adults in the UK have diabetes.

* In 2001, just under 7,000 deaths due to diabetes were officially recorded in the UK. This, they say, is likely to be a huge underestimate because other diseases caused by diabetes (such as cardiovascular disease) are normally given as the cause of death.

* They say a better estimate is found in the World Health Organization's 'Global Burden of Disease Project' (Murray CJL, Lopex A (1996) The Global Burden of Disease. WHO: Geneva) which suggests that in countries like the UK there are about five times as many deaths indirectly attributable to diabetes as directly attributable. This would mean that there are about 35,000 deaths a year in the UK attributable to diabetes - or about 1 in 20 of all deaths.

So what has caused the epidemic of diabetes? No doubt there are many factors, including diet and obesity. But Conventional Medical drugs are also implicated, including Beta Blocker drugs, and diuretics.When will our news media begin putting the spotlight on pharmaceutical drugs? They know that they cause 'side effects'. So why do they not investigate when the 'medicines' we are being given to make us healthy are actually causing these epidemics of chronic disease?